US-South Korea War Games Coming This Monday

This Monday, the world’s largest computerized command and control implementation exercise between the U.S. and South Korea will take place. The Ulchi-Freedom Guardian (UFG) military training exercise has been ongoing every year since 1976 and has been conducted annually during the months of August or September. This year’s exercise will involve 17,500 American troops and 50,000 South Korean soldiers. The UFG exercise is separate from the joint US-South Korean military training exercises named Key Resolve & Foal Eagle, which was conducted earlier this year. Another one of the world’s largest training exercises.

Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is INSANITY.

Let’s call these exercises what they are, WAR GAMES. These war games aren’t in place to protect anybody, but a circus show to display American’s military might and control over the Korean Peninsula. How is this not considered a provocation? Let’s put this into perspective. What if North Korea conducted a joint-military training exercise with Mexico off the borders of Arizona? Or conducted nuclear bomb-dropping drills off the coast of California? Yeah, the Pentagon would have already responded with an actual nuclear dropping and we’d be losing soldiers in yet another war.

These war games clearly haven’t achieved anything. The Pentagon and South Korean military have been conducting these war games every year for decades. To put that into perspective, these war games began before Millennials ever existed. North Korea is still here and now they have nuclear weapons. How has the war games deflected North Korea? They haven’t and they won’t. These war games only perpetuates the ongoing Korean War (since 1953). Its the actions like the UFG and Foal Eagle that force Kim Jong-Un to keep building nuclear weapons and to threaten the Pentagon.

Imagine the amount of planning and preparation that goes into an exercise like this? Tens of thousands of troops, two large militaries, spread all over the Asia-Pacific region, all to topple one tiny little regime. What if our governments used all that thinking and know-how into preparing for a peace treaty? We’d have peace on the Korean Peninsula by now, that’s for sure. Yet, to this day we waste all those resources and experience into planning to destroy each other under the guise of patriotism, protection, and public-spirit. Nonsense. Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is INSANITY. Let’s try nonviolence for a change.

Let me be clear, I don’t want any nation to have nuclear weapons or a large military force, especially while the citizens of those nations are suffering from economic despair and low standards of life. Both the US and North Korean people are suffering while both militaries are taking all of the resources. North Korea is spending their much needed resources on building a nuclear program to protect themselves from the evil US war machine. America is spending over half of its federal discretionary spending on the military-industrial complex to protect themselves from… well, themselves. I once heard from a American peace activist, “The biggest threat to America is America”. I think so.

THE EMPIRE IS COLLAPSING

The Department of Defense recently completely a year’s worth of assessments and finalized their results in a document titled, “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primary World”. Investigative journalist, Nafeez Ahmed, did a great job of summarizing the document in this article. Nafeez describes the document,

An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs.

The solution proposed to protect U.S. power in this new “post-primacy” environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism.

Looking at the world through the lens of the Pentagon, they think that in order to keep the US on top of the world they will need to continue conducted the world’s largest military training exercise, continuing the world’s largest surveillance programs, and continuing the world’s largest propaganda stories.

Here at The Peace Report, our lens looks through the perspective of the people on the ground. We want to connect people, educate people, and offer ways to fight back against militarism, war, and bloated military budgets. Normal everyday Americans have more in common with the people we’re fighting, like North Koreans. Yes, that’s right. We both suffer from the hands of a few that control our governments, control our resources, and make policies that don’t benefit the majority. We both suffer from militarism. We both suffer from taking orders from people we’ll never meet who live in their ivory towers. Its finally time for us to hold hands and build the strength we need in order to change the world in which the majority of the people in the world begin to realize we are all the same. We’re just people with families who care about living a harmonious life. We want to be happy, not mad.

By the way, I just returned from South Korea. The people of South Korea want peace too.